Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) is investigating allegations that one of its suppliers illegally used high school students to assemble its watches at a factory in China, a major part of its global supply chain, a report by CNN Business said.
The Hong Kong-based labor rights group Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) said in a report last week that it found students being made to work on Apple Watch production lines at a plant run by Quanta Computer in the city of Chongqing.
The group claims students aged 16 to 19 were forced by their schools to work at the factory through compulsory internships, placed in jobs unrelated to their field of study, often made to work excessive overtime, and in some cases put on overnight shifts. All four of those practices violate Chinese regulations and Apple's own standards, SACOM said.
The allegations highlight the challenges faced by Apple (AAPL), the world's most valuable company, in monitoring its extensive global supply chains. China is Apple's second biggest market after the US.
Apple shares were off 0.11% to $216.06 by midsession on Monday.
READ: Apple analysts feeling optimistic ahead of results this week
The recent weakness in the stock of Netflix Inc (NASDAQ:NFLX) is seen by RBC Capital Markets lead internet analyst Mark Mahaney as an opportunity for investors to buy the video streaming market leader at a "back of the truck price," a report by Investopedia said.
Mahaney, who reiterated his bullish view on the company, expects Netflix stock to double in the next three years, marking a 40% jump from the stock's all-time high around $423 in June 2018.
The analyst suggested that Netflix's recent lows can be partially attributed to news regarding the company's culture, wherein CEO Reed Hasting encourages "radical transparency," including widespread emails explaining firing decisions, "real-time 360" lunches with peer to peer feedback, and the ability for any executive above the director level to see the salaries of all employees.
Shares of Netflix declined 3.75 to $388.73.
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) will be releasing its results on Tuesday after going through the toughest year of being a public company and analysts hope the news can't get any worse, a report by the Chicago Tribune said.
The social-media giant is expected to report third-quarter revenue of $13.8 billion, up 34% from a year earlier. Operating profit will be $5.79 billion, according to analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
Those projections come after another quarter of turmoil that included executive departures, a huge privacy breach, threats of regulation, and struggles to contain misinformation ahead of key elections in the US.
Investors will be watching user engagement numbers and expenses closely. Their top of the wish list: No more nasty surprises.
Facebook stock was off 0.65% to $144.42.
READ: Facebook fined £500k by UK watchdog over Cambridge Analytica data breach
Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) has been beaten by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) in 12-month Cloud revenue, a report by Forbes said.
Microsoft’s $8.5-billion in cloud revenue last quarter has helped it open a decisive lead over Amazon as the world’s leading enterprise cloud provider for the past 12 months, $26.7 billion to $23.4$ billion, the report said.
While Amazon’s AWS cloud unit put up another set of great numbers for the quarter ended September 30 - $6.68 billion in revenue, up 46% -Microsoft’s fiscal first quarter was simply better and reflected its continued strength across every facet of the white-hot enterprise-cloud market, with commercial-cloud revenue at 47%.
Separately, the UK is considering introduction of a UK Digital Services Tax. This will be a narrowly-targeted tax on the UK-generated revenues of specific digital platform business models. It will be carefully designed to ensure it is established tech giants - rather than tech start-ups - that shoulder the burden of this new tax.
Amazon stock lost 4.4% to $1,570.
Alphabet Inc's Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Google’s new Discover feed, which it announced as part of its 20th anniversary last month, has made its way to Google’s US homepage on mobile, a report by The Verge said.
The feature adds a series of information cards underneath the search box on the google.com homepage when accessed from a mobile browser.
The bulk of these cards revolve around relevant news pieces, but the feed can also show sports results and weather forecasts and will change based on your interests and search history.
The update is a significant change for the world’s most trafficked web page, which has historically been kept pretty clean aside from the search box at its core.
It’s a big sign of Google’s shifting attitude towards surfacing information, where the search giant is increasingly trying to predict the information you want before you actually search for it directly.
Google shares fell 2.23% to $1,047.61.
Reporting by Rene Pastor, contactable on rene.pastor@proactiveinvestors.com